Many Images No Longer Linking To Games - HELP!

[jrusso4587]

I am lucky enough to have a large collection of Windows Games (~800) and when I opened up Launchbox today, it seems that about 25% of all my images (box-front, clear logos, and screenshot - gameplay) are no longer showing up. I have the files, but Launchbox stopped recognizing them. I can re-link them since the files are still there, but it would really suck to have to do that for literally hundreds of images that are named correctly in their respective folders. What is even stranger is that it only happened to that platform. I have tried to restore from my earliest backup and that did not fix the issue. Has anyone ever encountered this issue and if so, what fixed it if anything?

Any help would be appreciated.

UPDATE: It did happen to other platforms with no rhyme or reason, but to a lesser degree.

Edited April 28 by jrusso4587

[C-Beats]

If you select the game(s) in question and press F5 do the images return?

[jrusso4587]

Hi,

No they do not unfortunately and it is very frustrating since now that I have gone through all my platforms, I found many more that no longer "work" and that there is no pattern to which ones work and which ones do not.

The only possible issue is that there are images that I simply dropped into the folder that I named exactly like the rom name instead of importing them through LB (where it adds the -01) and whereas LB used to recognize it just fine since the name matches, now it can't and therefore no longer shows up until I formally import them, which is what I have been doing. I have just been slowing relinking the images one by one, but I'm afraid it will happen again. 

[Retro808]

What are some examples of game titles missing images? Can you post a pic of LB and what you see? 

I am going to assume most may be games with ":" in the title. Such as a title like Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad. If you manually added the images and did not convert the ":" to and underscore "_" then this could be the issue. If this is the case with the title I am not sure why it would work for a while then not as LB typically converts the name to that. 

[faeran]

Like Retro is mentioning, if you have a specific example where you have an image file named after a ROM you have imported into LaunchBox, that could help track down what is going on with your library.

We'd need the name of the image file that isn't linking, along with the launching section of a game's edit window showing the name of the ROM file.

[jrusso4587]

Thank you for responding and offering to assist. One example of the issue is with my NES set. I've had zero issues with it for years and all images / videos appeared just fine. Then Baseball for the NES loses ALL  of it's images and videos (Box Front, Box - Back, Box - 3D, Clear Logo, Screenshot - Gameplay and Video). I did what you suggested and took a screenshot (below) and noticed that the name does not 100% match, which logically would account for why this is happening as not every image was downloaded by LB. There are a bunch that were added manually or from other sources. There are also random games that have the colon issue that were added manually with dashes and now do not work. However, like Retro says, that cannot explain why it worked for years even though the names did not line up. My guess is that Launchbox was doing some fuzzy matching of the name under the hood and basically "matched" it because it was essentially the same game. Maybe that "matching" process changed at some point recently with an update, therefore causing the issue. It is just very weird since I am sure I have many others named like that that did not all of a sudden disappear. Seems totally random, but is a little frustrating as now I have hundreds of images and videos across my collection that now have to be fixed. All the common systems (NES, GBA, etc.), I can just download, resize (because I am OCD about image sizes matching exactly...lol) and move on, but Windows games will take some time since there is much less for that in terms of good images. At the end of the day, I am just venting about a high quality problem and am lucky to have this great collection and software to display it all. It would be nice to know the reason though. Thanks for listening.

ONE LAST QUESTION: Is there a way via the images view (I know I can do it through the audit) to see ONLY the games missing a certain media or video? I see that I only have an option to hide games with missing media, not the show only the games with missing a certain media. 

Edited May 5 by jrusso4587

[JoeViking245]

2 hours ago, jrusso4587 said:

ONE LAST QUESTION: Is there a way via the images view (I know I can do it through the audit) to see ONLY the games missing a certain media or video? I see that I only have an option to hide games with missing media, not the show only the games with missing a certain media. 

I can't attest to the file naming conventions 'changing'.  1st thought looking at the screenshots is that the ROMs region got changed (USA) from when the game was first installed (UE).  But don't take that to heart as that's not why I'm butting in...

On the left side-bar, you can select Games Missing Media.  From there, you can sub-select from different media type.

[jrusso4587]

That is very helpful. Thank you so much. My biggest pain point for images is MS-DOS and old Windows games clear logos. I will set up a separate topic for this, but is there an easy way to create thousands of generic logos using a pre-made background and generic lettering? I have seen many builds that use this for DOS games, but want to know the program used to create them.  By doing that, I can have logos for ALL the games in my collection, which would be wonderful.